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Featured Article
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Seattle University
Entrepreneurship Center Presents
Venture Financing Roundtable
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"Fantastic Workshop."
George Stoulil, CEO
"Real Tools."
Nancy Hawkins, CEO
"A Class Act."
Eli Zelkha, Palo Alto Ventures
"Unique and Successful."
John Garcia, Angel Strategies LLC
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"Venture Financing Roundtable"
A 2-Hour Conversation and Networking Program
Held Every Other Tuesday Evening
5.6.03 - The Venture Maturity Index
5.20.03 - The Financing Timeline Tool
6.3.03 - The Equity Sales Budget Tool
6.17.03 - The Equity Customer Profile Tool
Evenings: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Fee: $30 in advance, $60 at the door.
Register early. Seating limited to 30.
"The Venture Assessment"
A Full Day Team Building Discovery Workshop
Learn to Assess a Venture Deal Using Tools
Friday: May 23, 2003
Friday: June 20, 2003
8 AM - 5 PM
Fee: $495
Seating limited to 20 (4 - 6 teams).
Location for these programs (Seattle, WA):
Seattle University, Casey Commons
"An Executive Conference Center Facility"
Register Here
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Greetings! Welcome to VenLogic´s first newsletter. In this issue we are featuring our Executive Roundtable on Venture Financing. We've closely monitored the changes in the private equity marketplace sought by Limited Partners in the venture industry. Get a glimpse of the new tools and techniques for the new world of venture financing. Entrepreneur venture assessments and venture fund transparency will become more commonplace. Learn what this means and how to apply the changes to your situation. Please join us for a series of engaging conversations on the process of funding and building early stage companies.
We provide Structured Funding Tools and Executive Programs that enable CEOs to more easily raise venture financing, thereby saving time, money and equity. These are intended to be working sessions that extend beyond the typical seminar or workshop. Come and learn how to apply these venture assessment and development tools on your own deals. These new tools provide expert insight applied to the "black art" of venture financing on real venture financing cases.
For: CEOs and entrepreneurial teams who may be seeking equity or debt financing. Who need an unfair advantage in raising capital and proven solutions for growing their business faster.
For: Corporate Investors, Private Investors, Professionals, and Academics who participate in the $300B Private Equity Venture Ecosystem.
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Know Your Venture Maturity Index™ - How Venture Assessments Drive Better Deals
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 A quantitative assessment of the notoriously qualitative world of venture capital may seem counterintuitive to some. Yet today, there is one industry that exceeds the Venture Capital Industry in terms of its adoption of an assessment system that drives the process. For the "old guard" venture guys, the concept of designing a venture assessment tool probably sounds as preposterous as the idea designing a tool for assessing the intelligence quotient of an individual 100 years ago. After all, people are complex beings. This is especially true of children - very small, underdeveloped people who lack education, a vocabulary, and often suffer from physical and emotional issues. How in the world can we generate an index that measures a person's intelligence that has any meaning or value?
Venture Assessments are not only possible, they are essential. We have seen what happens when there are no tools or process to help investors manage the layering of issues in ever more complex, fast moving markets. The investor's dilemma is a convoluted knowledge management problem. This is the problem of managing qualitative data in a quantitative manner. The problem of providing a consistent assessment with a professional report as to the findings, giving a clear sense of the investor's boundary conditions and investment guidelines. The investors must also perform these tasks in a cost effective and timely manner. Without a process, these are big expensive problems. Tools can make the difference.
- What is your firm´s Venture Maturity Indexô and how do you compare to your peer group?
- How do you spot the deal gaps that most often lose investor capital?
- What is your "game plan" for closing the real or perceived deal gaps, on time and under budget?
- Are you sure you're raising enough capital from the right investors? What's your basis?
For more, attend the Venture Financing Roundtable:
May 6, 2003 - "The Venture Maturity Index"
May 20, 2003 - "The Financing Timeline Tool"
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Bulding your Target Equity Customer Profile - Spotting the VC's Fund Budget Gap
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The cost of running the "business of building businesses" is rising at an estimated rate of 15% CAGR. Where it used to take $8M to take a company public 21 years ago, today it takes over $50M. When the increased business building cost is plotted against the typical operating budget for a simple venture fund, we discover a budget shortfall for certain seed funds. Most talks on raising venture financing focus on ìwhereî the money is, for those hunting without a game plan in an invisible landscape.
Our Equity Marketing approach is different. We recognize capital is available. In fact, many funds are pulling back due to lack of quality deal flow. Instead, we help companies become smart money customers that attract the right capital to them. Which begins with understanding your equity customer profile and how their business operates. In recent years, many venture funds (and private investors) over promised and under delivered. Their limited partners, who lost billions, are now rewriting the rules around transparency and disclosure of the closely held practices of venture firms.
Start preparing today to use these inevitable changes to your advantage. Understand that once you've segmented the equity investor marketplace, next comes customer profiling. Understand how to develop your "target equity customer" profile, which goes deeper to reveal the longer-term impact on your business and shareholder wealth (e.g. budget gap). Know what you want in an investor and what you don't. That one step lowers your "Equity Sales Budget" and accelerates the venture financing process tremendously. Understand what your company needs to do to be a good "capital customer." Learn how to assess the venture fund, to ensure they "put their money where their message is," so to speak. The right financial partner can make the difference. The first step to attracting great investors is to show up educated on their business, knowing exactly why the fit is mutually beneficial.
For more, attend the Venture Financing Roundtable:
May 6, 2003 - "The Venture Maturity Index"
June 17, 2003 - "The Equity Customer Profile Tool"
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Know the New Venture Ecosystem - Where do YOU fit in the process?
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One of the great challenges every new entrepreneur faces is in understanding the players in the private equity ecosystem. Dozens of 2-hour Starbuck meetings often serves as a cursory free education with little understanding of the landscape. So hours are invested to figure out the big picture, often with incorrect choices made.
Currently, Gartner does not provide market landscapes to show segmentation of professional services (e.g. lawyers, CPAs, IT consultants) in your town. Once again, the entrepreneur's problem becomes shifted to the professionals who must educate them as the "cost of doing business." It's not surprising that the best professionals are too busy to do training, and since most are not trainers the educational content they offer is not up to par. Building good content is expensive and time consuming.
We aim to shed light on the dual "off the menu" roles played by professional service firms and how to differentiate and engage them. Many firms provide published professional services, while also providing certain unpublished services that are vital to the fund raising process. One thing is certain, process and partners matter. It's the entrepreneurís problem to manage this effort carefully if their goal is to "attract" capital, rather than seek it. Solution partners who randomly introduce companies to the wrong investors provide a dubious service that can create irreparable long term effects.
Entrepreneurs must learn how to identify, qualify and engage professional services that help towards the venture financing goal. They must also provide explicit instructions to those they engage, on their strategy and process, or else costly mistakes can occur. Furthermore, securities laws are fuzzy in the area regarding the use of consultants who take finders fees when acting as "broker dealers". Currently there are no statewide certifications for consultants who take equity for "services", although the expensing of stock options may impact these decisions.
Entrepreneurs have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to ensure that the consultants they engage are properly certified. Likewise, consultants must be aware of the personal liability they face for forming transactions that lose investor capital down the road. In the end, it's no different than a conductor who needs to know the musicians and instruments available to play a score of music. Everyone must be coordinated to play in unison, often by an inexperienced entrepreneur or board.
For more, attend the Venture Financing Roundtables:
May 20, 2003 - "The Financing Timeline Tool"
June 3, 2003 - "The Equity Sales Budget Tool"
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Expert Program Faculty
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Program faculty participation by invitation only for proven experts.
Contact us if you would like a leadership environment to showcase your firmís solutions for emerging companies and venture investors.
Be among a select group of industry insiders, who meet separately to help keep the VenLogic assessment tools in sync with the market.
Contact us today!
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